A Toxic Culture
It’s a fact that sexual assault happens among teenagers. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) “2015 Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance” report found that 10.3 percent of female students have been forced to have sexual intercourse, while more than 15 percent of girls who dated or “went out with someone” (69 percent of students) reported being forced to engage in unwelcome sexual activity. According to RAINN, 16- to 19-year-old girls are four times more likely to be victims of rape, attempted rape, or sexual assault than women as a whole. In addition, RAINN reports, girls who are raped when they are young are much more likely to be raped again. Moreover, as the CDC reports in “Sexual Violence in Youth: Findings From the 2012 National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey,” sexual “violence in youth, without appropriate trauma-informed interventions, can result in immediate and lifelong consequences, including physical, emotional, behavioral, and social challenges, as well as suffering future abuse or continuing the cycle in adulthood by abusing others.”While women have made tremendous strides in many areas, we still live in a deeply misogynistic culture. I would argue that, in some ways, gender roles have become more rigidly defined. Certainly, the media and entertainers more overtly objectify women. The widespread consumption of pornography—by young people as well as adults—exacerbates this problem. In The Big Disconnect: Protecting Childhood and Family Relationships in the Digital Age, Catherine Steiner-Adair notes that American children now first encounter pornography at age 11, adding that the pornography they see is not the same as the Playboy-variety that was widespread before the birth of internet porn. As Jackson Katz, writer, speaker, and activist on issues related to gender and violence, argues in The Big Disconnect, “porn culture ‘has shaped a whole generation of boys’ understanding of their sexuality and the way they interact with girls sexually.’” And, he says, they’re learning “an incredibly brutal form of men’s sexuality.”
In her book, Girls and Sex: Navigating the Complicated New Landscape, Peggy Orenstein describes a culture in which girls expect to service boys sexually and boys expect to be serviced. Girls may feel sexually liberated and behave accordingly, only to discover that a double standard still exists. They still get labeled as sluts while boys generally don’t experience the same shaming around sexual behavior.
Much as we might like to insulate our schools from the outside world, our institutional cultures cannot help but reflect the larger society. The Making Caring Common project’s national survey of more than 3,000 U.S. high school and college students found that almost half of seventh- through 12th-graders reported experiencing sexual harassment. The May 2017 Making Caring Common report, “The Talk: How Adults Can Promote Young People’s Healthy Relationships and Prevent Misogyny and Sexual Harassment,” observes that “words like ‘bitches’ and ‘ho’s’ are stunningly commonplace in many school hallways across the country.” In what the researchers describe as a typical sentiment, “The Talk” quotes a California high school sophomore survey participant as saying, “One thing that I think all girls go through at some age is the realization that their body, seemingly, is not entirely for themselves anymore … the unfortunate thing is that we all just sort of accept it as a fact of life.”
Changing the Culture
Educators and school leaders must help our young people avoid becoming the perpetrators or victims of sexual violence; and should they be sexually assaulted or raped, we need to help empower them to get support and report violations. The vast majority of schools have health curricula in which they address some of these issues, but we have an opportunity—and an imperative—to examine those curricula and ask ourselves whether we are doing enough. For example, as “The Talk” notes, most sex education focuses on the negative—how to avoid contracting STDs or getting pregnant. Rarely does our teaching address what the report describes as “how one develops a mature, healthy relationship.”“The Talk” report states that many respondents had never had a conversation with a school adult, for example, about: the importance of “not pressuring someone to have sex with you” (48 percent); the importance of “not continuing to ask someone to have sex after she or he has said no” (50 percent); the importance of not having sex with “someone who is too intoxicated or impaired to make a decision about sex” (46 percent).
While they haven’t had those kinds of conversations, 65 percent of 18- to 25-year-old survey respondents say they wish they had received guidance on some emotional aspect of romantic relationships in a health or sex education class at school; 43 percent of high school students say they wanted to talk with school adults about how to have a mature romantic relationship, and almost 30 percent wanted to talk about how to deal with break-ups.
Our young people want our guidance and we have an obligation to provide it. The CDC’s Stop SV: A Technical Package to Prevent Sexual Violence recommends starting in elementary school with lessons focused on empowering girls, providing bystander training, and teaching young people about healthy sexuality and relationships as well as general social-emotional programming, all within a context of positive social norms.
Our Approach
At Holton, we begin this work in the lower school, laying foundational skills such as being assertive, identifying and managing feelings, setting boundaries, seeking help, and developing self-awareness. In learning how to set boundaries, students start to understand the concept of consent. We also begin talking about relationships in the context of friendship, addressing such questions as what makes a good friend. As the basis of this learning, we use one of the CDC’s recommended programs, Second Step.Our health and guidance curriculum continues through middle school, focusing on these issues while adding others such as power dynamics and the role of sex in healthy and loving relationships as developmentally appropriate. Starting in seventh grade, students define harassment using the school’s harassment policy as the basis for discussion about bullying, both in person and online. From seventh grade on, each year also includes a special weeks-long activity associated with assertiveness training. For example, for the past two years, seventh-graders have participated in “Strong is the New Pretty,” an interdisciplinary art and guidance project in which students identify a personal strength and take a photo of themselves illustrating that strength. The photos with accompanying statements form an art exhibit, which is on display around the middle school for several weeks immediately following the completion of the project. Eighth-graders have the chance to dig deeper into the topics of sexual harassment and consent as well as gain practical assertiveness tools along with greater self-confidence through a full day of required training from specialists in women’s self-defense.
The school’s required ninth-grade health class emphasizes the topics of sexual harassment and assault, consent, and healthy relationships as well as the perils of alcohol and drug use. Students learn that sexual harassment, regardless of how one is dressed or whether one has been drinking, is never acceptable and that, regardless of the harasser’s intention, the person being harassed is the one who defines the encounter. They explore consent, learning that not saying “no” does not imply “yes”; why some people endure inappropriate behavior while others do not; how drugs and alcohol can make people susceptible to harassment and assault; and how to respond if one feels sexually harassed or is abused or assaulted. They also devote time to examining the characteristics of healthy relationships from platonic friendship to romantic relationships. As part of these discussions, they learn what one can do as a bystander, emphasizing how to help a friend. Bystander training bears particular importance because it puts discussion of topics that may seem irrelevant—“I’m never going to be sexually assaulted”—into a context that seems much more likely while also taking advantage of girls’ desires to support their friends.
We continue this work in 10th grade with the Alcohol Symposium, a required event for students and parents, where sexual assault, consent, and bystander opportunities are discussed in the context of case studies. We believe it is important for girls and boys to hear each other’s perspectives on these issues. In 11th grade, students join with the Landon School (MD), a nearby boys school with whom we frequently collaborate, for a Speak About It program, which includes a series of interactive skits and small-group discussions related to “consent, boundaries, and healthy relationships.” During senior year, Holton and Landon students take part in a Campus Culture Case Study led by a consultant from The NCHERM Group entitled “Drunk Sex or Date Rape.” This program includes coed small-group discussions of the case study and what to do if one becomes the victim of sexual assault.
Although we have had much of this programming for years, we have increased our focus on consent, sexual harassment, and assault in the context of the #MeToo movement, focusing on empowering girls to protect themselves physically and emotionally. We know that we haven’t fully accomplished this goal for every girl, but we do know from student testimony that the work they do around these issues has helped some of them take action to address sexual violence.
That said, we feel we need to do even more. We will extend our health curriculum into grades 10 through 12. We are developing required seminars by grade level that will include health units as well as other topics such as diversity, equity, and inclusion and social-emotional learning. Through these seminar classes, we aim to address issues of sexual harassment and assault and consent more comprehensively. As part of the seminars, we are planning to provide self-defense training in the upper school. We are also looking for ways to expand our collaborations with Landon so that boys and girls get to know each other better, thereby creating more constructive environments for discussions around sensitive topics like consent.
Moving Forward
Coeducational schools obviously have an advantage in this regard, since the natural relationships between boys and girls already exist. But girls and boys need opportunities for gender-segregated conversations around consent in particular, a complex topic that can be very confusing. Young people need to be able to delve deep into the topic without fear of judgment, a goal that is easier to achieve in a single-gender setting. This is especially important for boys. There has been much conversation recently about “boys will be boys” and fear for boys who are unfairly accused of sexual harassment or assault. We underestimate our boys when we act as though they can’t behave in ways that respect girls and women. We need to help them learn to treat women as equals, and to be their best selves. And we need to do more to address pornography and the toxic messages it sends. When we don’t, we let pornography do the bulk of the teaching about sex, and the content of those lessons is profoundly unhealthy.Making Caring Common advocates for broadening the contexts in which adults address these issues. We should train and empower faculty and coaches to intervene when they hear misogynistic and homophobic comments. English, history, and social studies curricula—even world language—offer teachers natural opportunities to discuss romantic and intimate relationships. And we also must encourage parents to have conversations about respecting others, consent, and healthy relationships with their children, and provide parent education to support these kinds of conversations.
In all this work, we should aim to develop a strong sense of self, along with personal agency, in our young people, especially our girls. We should establish gender equity as our ultimate goal, for only when we have a society grounded in true gender equity—embraced by girls and boys, men and women—will we root out sexual harassment and assault. That’s an ambitious goal, but it’s a good time to start working toward it.